At a company I once worked at one of the managers sent out an email. Could anyone volunteer to give some programming classes at one of the local schools? It sounded ok: a bit of outreach and a chance to educate the next generation. Until I looked up what school it was. Turned out it was one of the elite private schools for rich kids only.

One of my co-workers replied, saying that they had also looked up the school and that they were affluent enough that they could just hire a hacker for a few evenings. There are plenty of hackers around who could use a bit of extra income. They also said that volunteering for this would merely help to perpetuate special privileged access to skills or knowledge by the rich, and I agreed. I said it's not a feedback loop that we should be helping to reinforce. If it were a state school it would be a different proposition.

It later turned out that the school in question was where the manager was sending their own children, and this pulled the rug out from their previous often repeated statements about "believing in meritocracy". It made them look like a hypocrite - claiming that anyone could rise while trying to give an already over-privileged class yet more advantages.

In a later meeting when the hypocrisy was pointed out the manager went on a rant about "there will be no more politics at this company". Everyone just looked at them as if they had just said something really unintelligent. Which of course they had.

There is always politics in hacking. Many of the hackers of my generation didn't come from elite schools. They were not "toffs" with special tutors. Most attended state schools and were self-taught on home computers. The "apolitical hacker" is just someone who thinks that their own politics should be hegemonic.

When designing a user interface, imagine some old woman using it, say Margaret Hamilton, and she's clicking your app's buttons and saying to you, as old people do,

"Young whippersnapper, when I was your age, I sent 24 people to the ACTUAL MOON with my software in 4K of RAM and here I am clicking your button and it takes ten seconds to load a 50 megabyte video ad and then it crashes

I love that literally the DAY OF Tumblr hittin the shits Twitter decides that its newest fun thing is "Jack Dorsey sent an envelope of his beard hair to Azealia Banks so she could craft an amulet to protect Dorsey from ISIS". Tumblr's communal curse needed a new host

Instance is synonymous with server, and I think using the word "instance" was a bit of a mistake on my part during early Mastodon development. It's a programming term that less people are familiar with from other contexts. I suggest using "server" in your UIs

"Welcome to Magic School. Here is your schedule.""Thanks! But...""Yes?""This is just 'Ethics' and 'Human rights' and things like that.""Correct, that's the first year curriculum.""Do we have to learn all this?""Of course! What do you think this is, software engineering?"#MicroFiction#TootFic#SmallStories

One thing Tumblr has that most other platforms don't is the mix of social media interactions and customizable blog themes. I kinda wish someone would do a similar thing, hopefully even federated because centralized infrastructures are just plain too expensive to run, but unfortunately I don't really have nearly enough coding experience to even begin to do that myself.

Huh, Mastodon is actually really usable on mobile browser. I should have expected that, but I'm too used to commercial social media sites actively breaking functionality to get people to use their app.